Lawyer Tricks On Display In Hearings On Arms Deal With Iran

August 12, 1987|By Charley Reese of the Sentinel Staff

The Iran arms hearings provided a good lesson in lawyer tricks. Most of the politicians on the committee are lawyers.

A favorite lawyer trick is placing a thing or matter out of context. You remember how John Poindexter was hammered for not always being able to recall exact details of conversations or sequences of events.

The hidden assumption underlying the questions and snide comments was that the Iran arms deal was an immensely important operation that had consumed Poindexter's time. Obviously if he can't remember the details of such an important venture, he's lying -- or so they intended you to think.

The hidden assumption is wrong. The Iran arms deal and the subsequent contra funding were not considered all that important at the time. Poindexter, having delegated the task to a competent subordinate, properly paid only cursory attention to it.

He was involved in arms control talks with the Soviets, with summits, and with many other national security matters and operations that concern the president of a global power.

It is the committee and the press that made a big deal out of the arms sales. The only big deal has been their reaction after learning of it. At the time it was happening it was clearly a subsidiary operation.

Therefore it's not unusual that Poindexter does not have exact recall of all conversations and meetings touching on one of many tasks he was handling. Test yourself. Think back just nine months to a specific day. Try to recall precisely what you did, who you talked to, what you said, what they said.

The arms sale itself has been taken out of context. Much has been made of the fact that the State Department was urging allies not to sell arms to Iran or Iraq. What was not said was that the allies never paid any attention to the State Department. It was a French missile that blasted the USS Stark.

Iraq invaded Iran nearly seven years ago. Military men who were in Iran just before the shah fell tell me that they could not have started the war with more than a 30-to-60-day supply of ammunition and spare parts. Yet the Iranians have fought well for nearly seven years.

Obviously they and the Iraqis have been buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms, most of them from European arms dealers. The amount involved in the transactions by the Reagan staff were, just as Reagan characterized them, insignificant relative to the massive and continuing flow of arms in that war from other sources.

Another out-of-context ploy has been all the moralizing about lies and deceptions. If you're trying to keep a secret and people keep asking you about it, you have two choices: lie or reveal. The Gestapo asks: Are there Jews in your attic? Tell the truth and commit murder or lie and save lives.

Moreover, let's put the Congress in context. This was not a collection of fair-minded statesmen sniffing around the White House to see if any help was going to the contras.

This was a Congress in which the hard left had set out to destroy the Nicaraguan resistance. It was not content to cut off U.S. funds. It sought, through the Boland Amendment, to prevent any help from any source reaching the Nicaraguans' democratic forces.

That can mean only one thing. They were not interested in preventing U.S. involvement. They were interested in destroying the contras.

There is precedent. In the 1970s the leftists in Congress were not content that U.S. troops had been pulled out of Southeast Asia. They cut off aid to the South Vietnamese and Cambodian governments. The inference I draw from that is that it was not non-involvement by the United States they sought but victory by the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge.